I’ve just returned from vacation and spend some time on the way home, preparing to dive back into work and my ‘real-life’. Part of this included dipping into the streams on my RSS reader.
Without many qualms I simply marked many feeds, “all-read”. I skipped hundreds of important articles, ideas and discussions. Here’s why:
1. I’ve got a good network. I follow people who can keep me up to date and add value to my life. By tracking with influential people, I just need to read their feeds to get the highlights or the best of the crop. If I missed something, I’m confident it will surface again somewhere in my network.
2. If it’s important news, it’ll still be news this week. I’m confident in the feeds that I follow, if there’s something that important that happened while I was gone, it’ll surface again.
3. Good vs. best. I’m not a slave to my feeds. My feeds are there to help me when I need new ideas, when I want to keep up with the latest or just track with friends. The past two weeks were about spending time with my wife and other loved ones. That was the best thing I could have done with my time, not fret about some feed for the sake of feeling like I’m all caught up. I try not to let my feeds distract me from the best things I can be doing at any given moment. Sometimes the best thing is to read feeds, but not the last two weeks.
What helps you be okay with marking your feeds, “all-read”?
doublederivativeca 
I realized one day that I read way too much information that I didn’t need at all.
So now instead of trying to be up to date with every source of information I like, I try to read only when I have time, and only about a selected type of news. It frees up a lot of time and energy for everything else I have to do in a day.
Not only did I marked a lot of feeds “all-read”, I unsubscribed to a lot too… – And I kept your blog! 😉
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I’ve been thinking about this as well because, like Jacques, I find I spend too much time reading things that, even if they’re useful, I’m likely to forget the next day anyways due to the overload.
I’ve been wondering if I were to simply choose one good article per day to focus on whether I may benefit much more over time – at the expense of missing immediate news.
Right now I never mark any RSS feeds as “all read” because I only subscribe to those that I know I absolutely want to read every post (this isn’t very many). I use Twitter feeds for everything else and a plugin that limits the amount of time I spend. This helps me spend minimal time on less important updates… unfortunately I’m still overloaded. There is a lot of really good stuff out there!
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Interesting approach, especially in that you only subscribe to feeds that you want to read every post on.
What’s the plug-in that you’re referring to?
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The plugin I use is LeechBlock for Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock/
There are a number of different plugins though, this is one for Chrome:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/laankejkbhbdhmipfmgcngdelahlfoji
I find it’s not really the best solution, but it does help me to spend a reasonable amount of time on sites like Twitter and Facebook.
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What?!?!?! This means you missed MY blog! For shame.
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